Trump Expands War on Terror Battlefield in Somalia and Beyond

The U.S. war against terror, expanded in the shadows with covert drone strikes under former President Barack Obama, has come screaming into daylight with the Trump administration’s rapid widening of the battlefield and stripping of protections for civilians in besieged nations.

On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that President Donald Trump had granted military officials wider authority for conducting airstrikes in Somalia after it was reported that the White House had also relaxed rules meant to prevent civilian causalities in the region.

In a statement provided by the Pentagon, spokesperson Capt. Jeff Davis on U.S. Counterterrorism Operations in Somalia said that Trump “has approved a Department of Defense proposal to provide additional precision fires in support of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali security forces operations to defeat al-Shabaab in Somalia.”

Earlier in the day, New York Times reporters Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt broke the news that Trump “signed a directive on Wednesday declaring parts of Somalia an ‘area of active hostilities,’ where war-zone targeting rules will apply for at least 180 days,” citing “officials familiar with internal deliberations.”

This new designation, Savage and Schmitt note,

What’s more, it comes at a time of extreme drought and famine in the region, which the reporters say “has increased the frequency of groups of people moving around, often while armed, in search of food and water—increasing the risk of mistaking civilians as Islamist fighters.”

The move follows a similar expansion of war powers in Yemen. As Common Dreams reported earlier this month:

Addressing the press last Friday, Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the top officer at Africa Command, acknowledged they were asking for the protections to be revoked, saying: “It allows [us] to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion.”

Specifically, declaring the Horn of Africa an “area of active hostilities” allows the U.S. military to carry out strikes against individuals without the burden of proving that they “pose a threat to Americans” and without needing to be near-certain that no civilian bystanders will be killed.